Prabhakar Misra is an American physicist, who researches and teaches at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and is currently a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Born and raised in India, he came to the United States to pursue graduate studies in physics. He earned an M.S. in Physics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1981 (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), followed by a Ph D. in Physics in 1986 from The Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio). After a post-doctoral fellowship at the Laser Spectroscopy Facility of The Ohio State University, he joined Howard University in 1988. He was a Visiting Scholar in 1990 at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.

Misra's research interests are in the following areas: Raman Spectroscopy and Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Nanomaterials; characterization of stable molecules, free radicals and molecular ions using laser spectroscopy; development of spectral library and databases of organic molecules of relevance to the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission; and machine learning and algorithm development of relevance to START databases (GTD, POICN and PIRUS).